Monday, May 25, 2015

The verses in Bengali, using its traditional script and standard spelling, are followed by a loose translation into English, and then by a transcription into Roman letters.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------প্রেমের কথা বলব কাকে?

---------------------------------------------------------------------To Whom Shall I Speak Of My Love?The words I had to say, with love,those words are still with me,but not the one, to whom I shouldhave softly said them then. To whom shall I speak those words of love?They’ve stayed within my heart.I pass my days in sorrow, yetyou see I smile by chance.Should I now recount my griefor sing my song of love?Or should I smile because I seethe way you once had smiled? ****** The humming and the rhythm andthe tune and then the end…You came like music and like song,but in their midst you left.Where is your song and where are you?And when will you return?You never will return from there!The evening comes apace.

To whom will I speak the words in my heart?Perhaps in the ear of the wind?The wind, it will blow and carry the wordsof my love to a hearer afar.2015, 25th May, Mon*, 4:49 pm(* Memorial Day, in the U.S.A., for soldiers killed in wars)Bensonhurst. Brooklyn, New York-------------------------------------------------------------------------

That Roman transcription below follows the standard (West Bengali) pronunciation, but not the standard spelling currently used with the traditional script.

Although the traditional script is beautiful and irreplaceable, the standard spelling is based upon a pronunciation that is now either archaic or borrowed. This spelling faithfully preserves and represents the old roots, but is better suited, phonetically, for Sanskrit or for the eastern Indo-Aryan dialects of Bihar than it is for the dialects of Bengali that have prevailed in most of the Bengal delta, probably for the past several centuries.

For the purposes of correctly representing the pronunciation of Bengali in Roman letters, it might be best, therefore, to abandon the non-phonetic or quasi-phonetic aspects of standard Bengali orthography.

Of course, standard English spelling is even worse at representing English speech. Indeed, the spelling of English is probably as far from phonetic as one could possibly get without lapsing into total arbitrariness.

So while a Romanization might be of service to those who come to Bengali with literacy in a Western European language, it is surely advisable to also avoid the vagaries, limitations and ambiguities of English spelling.

So one has to devise or borrow a system of Romanization that can faithfully mirror the actual pronunciation of Bengali words.

In doing so, however, one might have to abandon any attempt to preserve the old root words that might ease the comprehension of written Bengali for those familiar with an ancestral or sibling tongue, such as Sanskrit or any of the Indo-Aryan tongues, or even those Dravidian languages that have borrowed heavily, especially in their literary forms, from Sanskrit or its daughters.

A similar complaint may be lodged against any phonetic rationalization of English spelling, which might of course obscure the Latin and other root-words whose fossils are still recognizable in the current spelling of English.

A brief outline of the transcription scheme used below may be found in the preface at: